| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and the Transformation of America, 1815–1836. By Harlow W. Sheidley. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. xviii, 283 pp. $50.00, isbn 1-55553-370-1.)

In January 1830, with that reckless indifference to subtlety that was his trademark, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton charged New England politicians with conspiring to dominate the nation by subverting the interests of the West and South. South Carolina's Robert Y. Hayne followed Benton with a blistering indictment of the Federalists' regional stronghold, to which Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster responded with an early version of his many famous "hymns" to the American national Union. Critics scorned Webster's rhetoric as sectional prejudice pretending to be national interest; now Harlow W. Sheidley offers a book-length study drawing much the same conclusion. Smugly convinced of their superior virtue and never reconciled, Sheidley argues, to popular (read Republican) leadership, Massachusetts "conservative leaders" labored from the Hartford Convention through Webster's presidential campaign of 1836 to recapture the government and impose upon the country the cultural values of their old Standing Order. . . .

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